Still tired after that covid nonsense, but I've managed to find some stuff to read anyway 
Happy invoicing!
- Follow the Leader - ”In the waning days of the Cold War, Rainer Sonntag helped fuel a neo-Nazi movement that still plagues Germany today. He was also a Communist spy—and worked for Vladimir Putin.” Might have known it
- Life Helps Make Almost Half of All Minerals on Earth - ”A new origins-based system for classifying minerals reveals the huge geochemical imprint that life has left on Earth. It could help us identify other worlds with life too.”
- Facial Recognition—Now for Seals - ”A neural network, trained using thousands of photos of harbor seals, offers a noninvasive way of telling seals apart.” Handy if you have a lot of seals
- Grey wolf genomic history reveals a dual ancestry of dogs - No easy reading intro to this story, just the hardcore paper in Nature: ”We show that dogs are overall more closely related to ancient wolves from eastern Eurasia than to those from western Eurasia, suggesting a domestication process in the east. However, we also found that dogs in the Near East and Africa derive up to half of their ancestry from a distinct population related to modern southwest Eurasian wolves, reflecting either an independent domestication process or admixture from local wolves.”
- Starships and Continuity of Style - Thoughts on design trends across the centuries in Starfleet: ”A knowledgeable fan could look at a Federation starship and be able to tell you, within a handful of decades at worst, about when the ship class had been designed and first built over the two hundred year history of Starfleet… Based on four main datapoints -- the original series Enterprise, the movie refit, the Excelsior, and the then-new Galaxy Class -- the folks involved in bringing the universe to life as the series continued to progress looked at the details and drew a stylistic timeline to which they adhered pretty well.”
- Queens of Infamy: Isabella of France - Another cracking queen's story told by Anne Thériault: ”The person leading the army wasn’t a king or a prince or a red-headed upstart duke, but a woman who was already the queen of England — had been queen, in fact, for nearly two decades. And the king she wanted to depose wasn’t some usurper who had unjustly taken the throne, but rather Edward II, her husband and the father of her four children. As she stepped onto that boat, the 31-year-old queen would set into motion a sequence of events that would leave her forever remembered as Isabella the She-Wolf of France.”
- The Fastest Formerly Blind ‘Biker Babe’ in Wichita - ”I woke up one morning in my mid-thirties and suddenly couldn’t see. I vowed if I ever got my vision back I would live life differently — I had no idea that would mean flying down highways twice the speed limit with a colorful crew in the dead of night.”
- Spy radio sets - Lots of good stuff in the Crypto Museum (nothing to do with funny-money-Ponzi-schemes) including these radios designed for spies: ”We are not trying to present a complete overview of all spy radio sets that have ever been used in the world. We only describe the sets that we have in our own collection, or that we've been able to research. That said, we do show a rather representative cross-section of the many different spy radios out there, and we try to describe them to the best of our abilities and provide as much information as possible.”
- X-ray reverse-engineering a hybrid module from 1960s Apollo test equipment - Ken Shirriff gets his hands on some more Apollo circuitry: ”In this blog post, I reverse-engineer a hybrid module that was used for ground-testing of equipment from the Apollo space program… The Up-Data Link was tested with the box below, labeled ‘Up-Data Link Confidence Test Set’. Our friend Marcel obtained this box at a scrapyard, so we set out to make it work, but unfortunately it had no documentation and a few missing components. After reverse-engineering its complex circuitry and performing some repairs, we figured out how it works: The test box read a command from paper tape, encoded it for radio transmission using phase-shift keying, fed the signal into the up-data link box, and then verified that the up-data link box took the proper action.”
- Urban Wildlife Photo Awards 2022 - Finalists and Winners Gallery - More cool wildlife photos, this time in the urban environment. ”Fox eating leftover chicken takeaway on the back of a truck- Wimbledon, April 2016” is by Martin Tosh
Happy invoicing!
.
. 
that I am.
Comment